Computerworld - Companies of all sizes have one thing in common: They create data and lots of it, including customer information, product specifications and accounting files. In fact, many corporations double their amount of internal data each year. With this level of growth comes the challenges of protecting that data from accidental deletions and disasters and complying with regulatory requirements for long-term retention.
In the past, protection and retention were handled by copying or moving data to tape. But the improving economics of disk storage and the emergence of archiving solutions create new options.
Backup
Backup technologies have long provided effective recovery options for systems subject to data loss from human error, hardware failure or major natural disasters. They are ideally suited for quick restoration of large amounts of lost information and can return complete systems to full operational capacity in a short period of time. However, backup also is a major pain point for storage administrators. Massive amounts of data can strain the ability of backup infrastructures to keep up. According to Gartner Inc., the average data center has a backup success rate of only 87%. Many would also tell you the ability to successfully recover data is even lower.
The time required to back up data is shrinking, and the ability to quickly restore information is significantly improved. By effectively leveraging backup across both tape and disk options, companies can increase the throughput and reliability of their disaster recovery infrastructure at a reasonable cost. Further augmenting traditional backup with replication capabilities will help solve the most rigorous data protection requirements.
However, these technologies will be only stopgap measures if the uncontrolled growth in the amount of data requiring backup isn't curtailed. This becomes a real danger when a company treats backup as a single solution for both data protection and data retention, resulting in highly ineffective and inefficient data management.
For example, most organizations perform nightly incremental and weekly full backups and retain backup data for three months to protect data in case of accidental deletions. A second copy of the data might be replicated (or shipped via tape) to an off-site location to protect against disaster. If you add on the requirement to retain the backup data for a period of years to meet data retention requirements, you significantly increase your backup overhead. An increase in data equates to an increase in costs, particularly in terms of time, money and personnel.
Let's take a hypothetical company like ABC Corp., which has 10TB of data on production file servers. Company
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